“Well, so I told Burnsy come look down into my morning two in that toilet there, and Burnsy laughed, and knelt, and looked down into my morning two and said, ‘Boney Maroney!’ and I said, ‘Damn right,’ and Burnsy said—and I kid you not, Tania, Tania?, Taly, sorry, but I kid you not, Miss Taly, I didn’t communicate nothing beyond ‘Damn right’ après Burnsy’s joyful ‘Boney Maroney!’ we were just that much a couple peas in a podfeather on the same page, same line, same word on the same page—and Burnsy says, he said, ‘You’re thinking the final chemical that would get us high is trapped inside the marrow in the bones that we failed to absorb in our bloodstreams for lack of having digested enough of the bones! Am I right, Woof, or what? Is that what you’re thinking?’ And I said, ‘Damn right,’ once again because that was but exactly what I was thinking when I saw them white bones in mon dumpsky. And Burnsy said, ‘I’m with you, brother. Let’s seclude us some robots and see if Jizzbrain will help us.’ And yeah, that’s the Jizzbrain—one who did all the skateboards and album covers and was, right about then, getting into sculpture projects and jewelry using Curio skeletons. Remember that hot minute when everyone was wearing that stuff? That was all Jizzbrain. Happened right after this time I’m telling you about. Few months. Maybe a year. Anyway, Burnsy knew Jizzbrain from through his cousin, and they’d gotten pretty tight after the cousin died, and stayed that way even after Jizzbrain was famous, so I knew him, too. Great guy, ol’ Jizzbrain. And not, obviously, a squeamish guy. Whereas me and Burnsy both were squeamish as girls in like pink Sunday frocks with starched-up collars and I don’t know Chantilly bibs and cuffs or whatever. But so Jizzbrain: he was already by then pretty famous, real busy, and we didn’t want to bother him more than oncelike, so we went to a cuddlefarmer and bought, I think, about ten cures—not that cheaply, either, this being what? 1991 still—and we had probably four between us already, and, once they all autodacted, that’s when we called up Jizzbrain, and he said, sure, yeah, just bring ’em by and he’d get the bones all cleaned and dry for us.
“And come a couple days later, he’d done as he said, brought the skellies by, and we sat in the kitchen with soup spoons and plates and turned the skellies into one big happy Scarface-looking pile of powder, and that was that. Experiment time.
“We snorted it, smoked it, put it in cookies, me and Burnsy, and Jizzbrain, too, just did it up til it was gone, took about a week, and wow it was good, and wow that was exciting, and then Jizzbrain got us a bunch more of his own skellies from his studio, and we ground those up, and within a few days, we were the most popular guys in town, bringing it out to parties, clubs, sharing it for nothing, or, you know, selling it at cost when the demand got high and the kids were strangers, but no profit at all, you know, not at all, just love—all goodwill-hippy and whatnot, telling everyone we met how to make it themselves, and by the end of spring break, they were all going back home to their colleges of origin or whatever, and spreading the word. And somewhere in there, a certain chart-topping, shall we say soon-to-be-most-successful-of-all-time heavy metal band that Jizzbrain knew from doing his artwork for, they came through town and we hooked them up, spent half a Friday night with them blowing our supply and pounding back their Jäger, and really just, really bonding, you know? Especially Burnsy. Those guys loved him—everyone loved him—and it’s uh, well…It’s cause of that, cause of how they loved him so much that they ended up dedicating their next album to him. I mean it wasn’t, uh— It wasn’t like just because uh…” Woof holds up a finger. “I just, um. Can I just, uh…” Woof draws a sharp breath.
“You want me to turn the camera off a minute?” the interviewer says.
“No, that’s okay, darling. I don’t…I guess I’m not too used to talking about this too much. Haven’t in a long uh time, you know, uh…Okay. Okay. Fuck it! Back to the tale of Burnsy&Woof, right? Yeah. So now so, what I neglected to mention is, about a week or so after we started hitting the clubs, we’d also started—just cause we thought it was funny—we’d started wrapping el producto up in these little like twisty-ended cellophane-type candy wrappers stamped with a Burnsy&Woof logo that Jizzbrain did up for us. You know the one, right? The burning dog of fire logo. And now that, I guess, is probably what impressed Graham&Swords the most—how we’d not only discovered this new use for their product, but we’d also kind of accidentally developed an extremely cool brand, you know? I mean that’s what convinced them to come find us, I think. Whatever the reason, though, they asked around and tracked us down, and eventually showed up on our doorstep one day, offered to hire us on as like consultants for a while. They were just I guess starting to go at a lot of chem kids back then—recruiting the top-of-the-class types before they finished school, but not yet somehow really thinking to go for the rebel dropout ones running the Ecstasy labs or what have you.
“And so they’d brought all these geeks to this or that G&S facility at that point, to work on PerFormulae mostly, and then me and Burnsy come along, which, in case I aint made it clear: we weren’t like that. Not at all. We knew fuck-all about chemistry, and we were straight up about that, but they mistook us for geniuses, anyway, G&S did. Geniuses of like ‘young American desire and design,’ the recruiter dork told us. They wanted our ideas, he said. And, you know, the pay was righteous—righteous—and we didn’t like school anywho, so we went up north soon as poss, hung out with the geeks, told them our ideas about what we thought people might want from future PerFormulae and whatnot, including like how we thought it would probably be good if the PerFormulae could be made in such a way as to somehow enhance or just change up a little whatever chemical it was in the marrow that gets a person high—sake of variety of buzz, you know—but nothing we said struck any of them as feasible, I guess—or at least so they said cause I tell you true we came up with BullyKing and Effete the both years before they hit the market, even the name of BullyKing was ours, Effete we pitched as Wuss or maybe it was WimpAss, I don’t remember, but they thought we were dummies, these chem kids, and we got moved to Accoutrements, which was basically a matter of like, ‘Which color zipper should we use on this new CureSleeve contraption? Gold or silver?’ and like, you know, ‘Do you think the kids these days want tiny licensed baseball caps to dress up their cures in? Which teams are the most neato?’ Boring taste and real silly tie-in shit in Accoutrements, basically, and that’s what we told them, we were honest, and soon we were shitcanned. Six, maybe seven months we lasted over there.
“But we’d saved a little dough, and our names were out there, Burnsy&Woof was the coolest. I mean, kids were making T-shirts with that burning dog of fire on them. So we got to thinking, and we called up ol’ Jizzbrain, and some venture capitalist friends of our dads, and we told them what we thought. And what we thought, we thought about gear. Utility, you know? In-oh-vay-shun. Like, Graham&Swords had the formula thing locked down, but they saw Accoutrements as just, like, apparel. I wasn’t shitting you about that zipper nonsense. Gold or silver. That’s where they were at. Who the fuck cares gold or silver though, right? Make the CureSleeve better. Slim the pouch so it doesn’t sag out so much, and line it with a kind of protective shell, like an athletic cup kinda deal to protect the cure from accidental blunt force and etcetera. And how about some outside-the-box thinking? Like could a cure not use a little bicycle? A pedal go-cart? A unicycle? Why not? You see them walking on their hands and shit. They got balance. Better balance than a human. And it’s not like people weren’t selling that kinda stuff, but it was all homemade, and the wrong kind of homemade, you know? Not boutiquey, more like flea-markety. And we had this name. This cool. This brand. We could mass-produce, and but just by putting our logo on there not seem mass-produced, just cause we were that cool that nothing we did would anyone imagine came out of the, you know, gray capitalist impulse, and…you know how that shit works. This is America. Everyone knows how that shit works, but we still buy into it. Celebrate it, even. Can’t help ourselves. Story of rock and roll, right? Metal band makes a classy black-and-white video for a song with a couple slow like acoustic parts in it, and they go number one, heavy rotation, platinum times ten, and still every kid at their concert just knows he’s the only person in all the world who really understands their music, even while he’s thinking it from row nine million at a football stadium he paid fifty fucken 1991 dollars to be at, even while all the fuckers who ever picked on him at school, razzing him over his haircut and boots and acne or whatever, they’re all down in front of the stage high-fiving each other and like…aw…oh…aw man…” Woof’s lips contort. He shuts his eyes, says, “Come on, now, Woof.”